BooksRock.com - Kids Books At Amazing Low Prices!

Most historians agree that only a small share of southern blacks experienced economic gains in the fifty years following the Civil War. Little attention has been focused, however, on the minority who successfully acquired property and conducted business during this time. In Enterprising Southerners, Robert C. Kenzer examines the characteristics of North Carolina's African-American population in order to explain the social and political factors that shaped economic opportunity for this group from the Civil War until 1915.

In 1885, black newspaper editor George Allen Mebane circulated a questionnaire to other North Carolina landowners and merchants, hoping to document and evaluate black progress from the antebellum years through the two short decades since emancipation. This invaluable primary document, as well as tax records, business directories, credit ratings, and census reports, have enabled historian Kenzer to assemble a remarkably thorough portrait of North Carolina's black population. Not surprisingly, he finds that African Americans who were already free before the war enjoyed greater success than their newly freed counterparts. The same held true for mulattoes, who generally prospered more than blacks; in 1870, mulattoes were four times as likely as blacks to own real estate.

What is surprising, Kenzer asserts, is that his research does not support lingering theories that the "heritage of slavery" adversely affected blacks'performance in the market economy. Instead, he blames economic barriers to development, such as lack of capital and poorly developed markets. This study not only provides a valuable history of one state's black population but also paves the way for similar scholarship in other southern states.